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Calvin Bedient on P L A C E by Jorie Graham

Infected by TimeMay 3rd 2012

IT TAKES CONFIDENCE TO NAME a collection of poems Place and even more to name a poem “Earth.” Such titles might suggest a dull positivism, a lapse of imagination (“Lapse” is another of the titles). Jorie Graham can afford these big-everything titles because she is never less than in dialogue with everything. She is the world champion at shot-putting the great questions. It hardly matters what the title is: the subject itself is always “the outermost question being asked me by the World today.” What counts is the hope in the questioning itself, not the answers. The answers can be summed up in the following words from “Untitled”: “we have other plans for your life says the world.”

Graham makes of the banal topic
“place” a great bonfire of the questions. We know her famous
“thirsting for ever greater aperture,” as she put it in “The
Guardian Angel of Point-of-View” in her sixth book Errancy.
In Teresa’s time, she might have become a saint. How she clamors to
know the absolute, even if it no longer presents itself except as
infected by time, planetarily. “The real is crossing you,” she
wrote in her first book, Hybrids of Plants and Ghosts, and
not to “know” what it is, what it knows, causes her anguish. Later,
in her eighth book, Never, she elaborated on the matter
magnificently: “O sweet conversation: protozoa, air: how long have
you been speaking? / The engine [of the most] is passing
us now. / At peak: the mesmerization of here, this me here,
this me / passing now… . We, who can now be neither wholly here
nor disappear … . how the instant is very wide and bright and
we cannot / ever / get away with it—the instant—what
holds the ‘know.’” The “most” is the default quantity of the
absolute, but it is so very much more than nothing. The title of
this poem, “The Covenant” is almost ironic; but, no, Graham
will not allow the irony. There really is plenitude, as if
promised: ” plenitude, yes / but only as a simultaneous emptying of
the before … .”

On the other hand, material
reality is (and there was a time when we knew this) a traumatizing
shock. The two-year-old child in the new poem “Mother and Child
(The Road at the Edge of the Field)” experiences it unprotectedly;
the sharp puzzle of torn grassheads that the poet deposits in her
hand announces it: “I watch / terror spray from you in / colonies
of tiny glances.” As for the poet herself, she says “I am / not
screaming because I am / old enough to hang on hang on.”

Everything “human” tumbles out
of the gash of this trauma. Graham tackles the ontological problem
like no other poet, more head-on, more fully, and with more exigent
distress. A virtual academy of one, she dramatizes the whole “p”
crowd of our troubles: personal, political, psychological,
philological, phenomenological, philosophical. The drama of her
career has lain in how her various hungers — to know the
essence of, to preserve the appearances of, to love — have
played out against her dreads: of history, of the passing of the
unique, and of words as mere phantoms.

Graham’s distinctive
hyperattentiveness — appetitive, self-worrying — now
flares up and now burns low. In her first two books the curiosity
about the “real” was restrained; just typed in, as it were. Then,
in the remarkable third, The End of Beauty, the torture of
not capturing completely what can be known took over and
deeply altered the form, the tone, the feel, the degree, the size.
The poems did not so much unravel as burst out from the old, staid
standard of the well-made:

Can you help me in this?

Are you there in your
stillness? Is it a real place?

God knows I too want the poem to continue,

want the silky swerve into
shapeliness

and then the click shut

and then the issue of
sincerity …

(“From the New World”)

After this transformation,
Graham’s poetry could hardly forget that “the shut thing” could
“not be true enough / anymore” (“Picnic,” Region of
Unlikeness) The next five books were marked by tugs-of-war
between discouragement and hope. But in her ninth and tenth books,
Overlord (2005) and Sea Change (2008), the tension
slackened off. Graham had nearly had enough of the ambition to be
our guardian angel of a potentially solving “point of view.” “The
balance is / difficult, is coming un- / done, & something
strays further from love than we ever imagined,” she notes in
“Nearing Dawn” in Sea Change, which ends with “the thought
that … you have / no rightful way / to live.” The lineation,
which before had suffered every shift and twinge of sensibility,
became nearly automatic. In Sea Change, in particular, the
alternation of a longish slip-easy prose line with centered short,
wiry, braking lines facilitated flat-level processings of
situations and place.

Though Graham has used the same
often-indifferent long and short line pattern in Place, the
new work has more fight in it. Feeling has returned to pace.
Witness “Torn Score.” At the start, there is urgency in the line
breaks as time tells against
her:

all shine

’ lessening
as also all low-flame

heat of

love: and places loved; space time and people heightening burning,
then nothing:

‘
always less

incipience as visible

time shows itself …

A hope-based need for a
“precise” art announces itself; the violinist inhales and “please
music begin, the years are / disappearing, no one will cough, . . ,
begin faithful to the one truth, precision.” And two pages later,
at the end of the poem, the promotion of life that is Graham’s
greatest gift reasserts itself:

and my

attention,

so hungry not to slip out of its

catch its
span-held

breath—hovers—

those
could be last fall’s leaves piled on dead leaves, thinning,
trans-

lucent but

they are feathers,

look close,

specked

coming loose from

snow and rushing now, all of them at once now, down, into the
branchfilled glassy

pool of sky to

thrash apart

small cheeping birds, all appetite—

In the long line beginning
“snow and rushing now,” the meter of the passage — otherwise
composed, mimicking held breath — is excited into sharing the
vital loosening. The Graham of The End of Beauty, stalwart
of heroic endeavor, is within hailing distance here.

A struggle not to disbelieve
and a painful promoting love also distinguish other strong poems in
Place, including “Although,” “Mother and Child (The Road at
the Edge of the Field),” “Treadmill,” “Sundown,” “The Bird that
Begins It,” and “Lapse.” The plots of most of these poems are too
big and loose, their openings-up of the world too resistant to
reduction, to be outlined here: the poems must be read and re-read.
The richest of them is the gorgeously dense “Although.” The poem
begins, puzzlingly, with the fragment “Nobody there” and continues
immediately with the nonetheless potent literary thereness
of “The vase of cut flowers with which the real is (before us on
this page) permeated-is it a page-look hard-(I try)-this bouquet in
its / vase-tiger dahlias (red and white), orange freesia (three
stalks) (floating / out, one / large blue-mauve hydrangea-head,
still wet,” etc. The explanation for “Nobody there,” seriously
delayed, is that we are “no longer … inhabitants,” being,
as we are, too much in our heads, “not really anywhere.” Besides,
the poem is more than half written into the future, when we
literally will not be there: “are there still ‘ones’ of /
things-vases or days- / you think it is wrong, perhaps, to play
this game. / when we are all / still here.” Is it “wrong”? No, but
it’s tricky; boldly novel; spooky.

All challenge, the poem even
says nay to its nay:

We must write the history of appearances

that tomorrow be invested

with today

as
casually as the conversation drifting in from the next

room

Graham has hardly ever evoked
things-in-places so full-bodiedly as she does here, showing us the
very thing to which we are theoretically not present. These objects
and actions are pictured, not thought, onto the page. In a spurring
reading, this demonstration is a lesson in how to observe, how to
participate in unmediatized appearances, so as to escape nullity.
In an existential reading, it is a skillful and all but undermining
exception to Graham’s argument that the human is constitutionally
outside the world. In any case, the poem qualifies her poetics of
grinding force by a loving particularity.

Graham’s drive to apprehend
(she goes so far as to call it “greed”) shows up in the book’s very
first poem, “Sundown.” The poem is a locus classicus of her
wish to master time, to prevent erasure. Here, as the poet sits on
Omaha Beach with her feet “in the breaking wave-edge,” a horse and
rider approach from behind. They are seen “flooded from the front
with the late sun he/they were driving into-gleaming- / wet chest
and upraised knees and / light-struck hooves and thrust-out even
breathing of the great beast-from just behind me, passing me.” For
good measure, Graham notes also “his hooves returning, as they
begin to pass / by,” the ambiguous “returning” making a potential
loop of the action. A lightning-quick processing, then, of a gallop
simultaneously behind, beside, and seen from in
front, with, as a bonus, a bionic hearing of the beast’s “even
breathing.” Contorting the law of succession, the technique here is
the “too much” of the sublime. It piles frame on frame to make the
horse a vital body so temporally layered on itself that it all but
arrests time, even backs it up, in what is, nonetheless, a gallop
through time “to clear out / life … where no one again
is suddenly killed-regardless of ‘cause.’” The multiple
perspectives interact, fruiting and clashing. Near the beginning of
the poem, the speaker is unaware of the approaching “calm full
gallop” (oxymoron as dare) behind her but aware anyway and turns to
look over her shoulder. Subliminal omniscience…

After the comparative lull in
Overlord and Sea Change, Place is hungry for
news of whatever “leaks out of … scene, / once it’s the
untheoretical here,” as Graham wrote in “Relativity: A Quartet” in
1993’s Materialism. Her dialectic springs back in nearly
full force, encompassing both “appetite,” an eruption of
presentness, and the human ineptitude for living. But once again
the would-be omnivorous (and omnipresent) Graham is checked not
only by omnipotent change but by the limits of discursivity, which
in Never she calls “stump interpretation,” and, to boot, by
run-away historical guilt-hindrances that say we have chosen the
wrong way to live. In fact, on balance, the tenor of Graham’s
poetry is “dark-true” (to adopt a phrase Graham uses
in Errancy to describe Pascal’s manteau). To quote
“Willow in Spring Wind: A Showing” (perhaps her finest ars
poetica), in the same book, she has kept her work faithful to
“the true roughness.” Even her phrase “this rosy sphere of hope and
lack” (“Manteau”) is too sweet to fit. Answerability weighs that
heavily on her as she strives to be a heroine of complete
perspective (by and despite “taking it all down”), while all
the time knowing it wouldn’t change a thing in the world’s evils.
“We are responsible for the universe,” she writes: a fearsome
sentence.

¤

Of the three major recurring
complaints in Graham’s work — time’s constant undermining of
appearances, the prison of language, and historical guilt — I
have yet to elaborate on the continuation of the latter two in
Place. I will take up the language problem first. If Graham
were not just a sensibility but a rage for thinking (and few other
poets have so thought themselves into poetry, so examined what they
have to say in the very act of saying it), silence would tempt her
more. But throwing herself into the task of articulation, as she
does, she must talk and talk (and also get the world to talk back;
the path, the minutes, the atoms, everything must talk).
Saying is the blood-spot in Graham’s work. Her poems
exemplify the modern misgiving that we are nothing outside of
discourse, that we speak ourselves into being what we are in an
effort to own ourselves, the species, the world. Silence won’t
suffice: “I have to trace a path,” the “speaking subject” says in
“Solitude” in Never, “I am sinking into the local the
temporal open, / that other-than-me who is the I.” But discourse,
inevitably marbled by inaccuracy, emptiness, and guilt, can’t
assuage the “terrifying … hunger” of which we are “slaves,” the
hunger at the least for a presence both languaged and transcendent.
Its manipulative greed is “not / precise enough,” says the fox in
the new poem “Lull,” an unsparing critic of the poet’s
failed greed (not a real fox, of course, but a dummy
ventriloquized by Graham, who, perforce, is ever in dialogue with
herself).

But the same fox also unfairly
chides the poet for having a linguistic brain (she can’t win):
“What a rough garment / your brain is / you wear it all over you,
fox says / language is a hook you / got caught … had you only
looked down / fox says, look down to the / road.” What to do? Will
it help to make each poem dynamic, that mode so endangered
now that all life has been squashed? Yes, let each poem step forth
as a being-in-itself elbowing its way into adventure. Even so, one
is honor-bound to keep one’s work (to echo Francis Ponge) on an
“appropriate scale,” to make of language “a shelter not much larger
than a body,” though “involving all [the creator’s] imagination and
reason.” Even Graham’s former stylistic boldness (in abeyance
now) suffered constraints. Whereas the literary avant-gardes
were nothing but attempts to solve the ontological dead-end of
discursivity, Graham doesn’t believe in a literary solution (or any
solution) to this problem. A magnificent poem like “Le Manteau de
Pascal” (from Errancy) is “wild with rhetoric,” but only
like the night, which is “full of hollowness.” No, by and large
there is only the impossible attempt to roll the stone of
discursivity out of the mouth of the world by means of
discursivity, an effort that cannot make the page a pop-up of
scenes of “the real” (despite Graham’s persistent
fantasy-ambition).

As for the third problem,
namely history, the antithesis of place in the new poems is the
“face” in “The Future of Belief,” a poem that at first may seem
unfortunately ugly, a lifeless fable, but on rereading emerges as a
marvel of ferocity. There is this face and you can shove a lot of
things into it, for instance “the centuries,” or troops inspecting
the keep, or forty-seven people shot and fed to the morning’s
ditch: “You can put their muddy jackets and the shawls held tightly
/ round for / one last / instant now into the face, you can.” It
can indeed be done, for history has done it; and, to its shame, the
face has yet to explode from the pressure.

Ever since “What the End is
For” in The End of Beauty — that frightening poem
evoking hundreds of roaring bombers on a North Dakota airfield
— Graham has often is accurate turned the lens of her poems
onto historical violence and asked, in effect, how do we get past
that? The most notable example of this mode in Place
comes in the poem “Message from Armagh Cathedral.” Here, the poet
begins with a characteristic general concern: “How / will it be
told, this evidence, our life, all the clues missing?” Soon she
notices a wedding rehearsal going on in the church. Then, after
four big pages, war comes in, briefly but memorably:

She is
trying

to say the vow again—till death do us part—and I cannot
make out what it is that

time will do to them. Why are we going this way, The flowergirls
are carrying a pretend

train now, laughter

as they go. The
ring bearer is carrying the pillow with no ring. In late morning
a

short time before

the explosive device hidden in the basket of fresh laundry went
off, Private Jackson,

who still had arm then,

reached down in secret, weapon in one
hand to feel the clean fabric. Actually

to smell it. Clean, he

thought. He used to hang it out for his mom, afternoons, hands up
at the shoulders

of each shirt, an

extra clip in his teeth as if surrendering. He remembers the line
up of shirtsleeves

all blowing one way

in the early evening, in Indiana, and for a blinding moment he
realizes they had been

pointing, his

brothers, his father, his uncle, they all had been
pointing—in their blues and whites

and checks. He

wished he had turned to see, is what he thinks just before it goes
off, they seemed

about to start a

dance—the tiny rhythm in the flapping sleeves.

Allegory is at its lightest,
its freshest, smelling most strongly of world, in this great
passage, where Graham’s empowering, oppressive concern with the
question “Why are we going this way” is both relieved and tortured
by a momentarily restorative sensual memory. What the wind-blown
shirtsleeves had been pointing to is perhaps what might have been
if we had gone with the wind that blows through us. (It is the same
wind that the sailor in The Waste Land pilots his craft
against, and the same that blows the easel away in modern
art.)

In effect Graham long ago
predicted the downturn she now writes about, in an almost
bare-bones manner in “Dialogue (of the Imagination’s Fear”), a poem
on a foreclosure. She has always known that the system, a “human”
effort, would fail, has failed. When still a young poet, she
quickly caught up with a conclusion articulated by Max Horkheimer
and Theodor Adorno in 1956: “the horror is that for the first time
we live in a world in which we can no longer imagine a better one,
a today without a tomorrow, a situation in which historical man,
certainly idealistic man, rots.” A poet of the (almost imaginable)
fullness of being, Graham can hardly have landed in a worse time,
and a more necessitating one, to do the work she is intent upon
doing and best equipped to do.